Would-be candidates jockey, often viciously, to get permission to run in election

Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei waves to the worshippers, in front of a portrait of the late revolutionary founder Ayatollah Khomeini, before he delivers his Friday prayers sermon on Feb. 3. Khamenei and other senior ayatollahs decide who may run for president.

Photograph by: Anonymous
, AP

In Iran, where election outcomes are stage-managed by the country’s religious leaders, the big political fights are over being picked for the star roles before the script is written.

With the next presidential election scheduled for June, Iran’s aspiring politicians are in frenzied campaigns to besmirch their rivals and catch the approving attention of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He, with his Guardian Council of senior clerics, decides who is allowed to be a candidate and who will win.

Iran’s current President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, cannot run again after serving two four-year terms. But Ahmadinejad is fighting hard to try to ensure one of his supporters becomes the preferred presidential candidate, no doubt so he has a peaceful retirement safe from the revenge of his enemies.

Ahmadinejad’s campaign has brought him into raging public conflict with his old rival from the 2009 election, the speaker of Iran’s parliament, Ali Larijani.

Larijani, whose influential political family includes brother Sadegh who is head of Iran’s judiciary, is widely rumoured to be positioning himself for another run for the presidency and to be favoured by Khamenei.

The intensity of this contest burst onto the public stage last Sunday when Ahmadinejad used the pulpit of parliament to accuse the Larijani brothers of abuse of power and corruption.

Ahmadinejad played a secretly recorded tape in which another Larijani brother, Fazel, appeared to be offering to get Sadegh Larijani, the head of the judiciary, to remove business obstacles in return for a bribe of $15,000 a month plus use of a large seaside villa.

The counter-punch to Ahmadinejad was swift. Late on Monday Saeed Mortazavi, a strong Ahmadinejad supporter and the man approached by Fazel Larijani for the bribe, was arrested and taken to Tehran’s infamous Evin prison.

The detention of Mortazavi, who was freed on Wednesday, was a clear warning to Ahmadinejad, several of whose associates and officials have been arrested in recent months in what appear to be expressions of dissatisfaction with the president by Khamenei and other religious leaders.

And Mortazavi is particularly symbolic.

He is now the head of Iran’s national social security office. But at the time of the 2009 election he was Tehran’s chief prosecutor and earned a reputation for brutality for his treatment of people detained for taking part in the mass rallies by the opposition Green Movement protesting Ahmadinejad’s fraudulent re-election.

Mortazavi became known as the “Torturer of Tehran” for his alleged role in the murder of three detainees in Kahrizak prison. He is also accused of involvement in the 2003 killing in detention of Canadian-Iranian journalist Zahra Kazemi.

So there was much rejoicing among Green Movement supporters when Mortazavi was detained and just as much unhappiness when he was released after only 24 hours in Evin prison, where he jailed and personally interrogated hundreds of opposition activists, journalists, students and lawyers after the 2009 election.

The Mortazavi incident is a reminder that the leaders of the reformist Green Movement remain in detention nearly four years after the 2009 election and that the opposition has not yet decided whether or not it will attempt to take part in June’s ballot.

Two reformist candidates from 2009, Mehdi Karrubi and Mir Hossein Mussavi, are still under house arrest.

Other key opposition leaders — including the former chairman of the parliament’s national security and foreign relations committee, Mohsen Mirdamadi, and former deputy interior minister Mostafa Tajzadeh — are in prison.

There is a spirited debate going on within the reformist camp about whether to try to field candidates in June.

Some argue that a precondition for taking part should be the release of all the political prisoners.

Others respond that participating would merely force the reformists to play by the rules set by the ultra-conservatives religious leaders and to yet again be the victims of the ayatollahs’ stage management.

What encourages some Green Movement members to try to field candidates is what happened in 1997, when the reformist Mohammad Khatami was elected president and then re-elected in 2001 despite the best efforts of the ayatollahs to stop him.

The clerics have tightened their control of elections since.

The Guardian Council was, however, very successful at preventing Khatami from implementing his reformist agenda.

He planned to introduce the rule of law, real democracy and an inclusive political process.

But Ayatollah Khamenei and the Guardian Council marshalled hard line Islamists in parliament and government against him.

Khatami lost all these contests and retired in 2005 with many of his supporters disillusioned.

Khatami remains a significant figure in the Green Movement, but has said he will not run again for president.

But the mere suggestion that he might gives conservatives anxiety attacks, and state-controlled television has recently taken to blackening his name by blaming Khatami for the 2009 postelection riots and demonstrations.

Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei waves to the worshippers, in front of a portrait of the late revolutionary founder Ayatollah Khomeini, before he delivers his Friday prayers sermon on Feb. 3. Khamenei and other senior ayatollahs decide who may run for president.

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